Monday, March 31, 2014

Dimitri Soudas is gone. According to Paul Wells, it was not a graceful exit:

Tonight, Hand-Picked Dimitri has become Ass-Kicked Dimitri,
having resigned (CP’s first version) or been fired (CTV’s version) or
been told to resign so he wouldn’t be fired (the later CP version) from
his job as dynamic and hand-picked Executive Director. And all with
barely 70 days left to go in his urgent, pressing, critical, essential
mission to save the Prime Minister and, with him (of course) everything
Canadians cherish.

Wells reminds readers that, when it comes to executive directors, the Conservative Party has been playing musical chairs:

Recall (he said as if there was any chance you actually would recall) that Soudas was the Conservatives’ third executive director in six months,
replacing Dave Forestell who replaced Dan Hilton who was left standing
without a seat when the music stopped on what is known in Conservative
circles as “the C-Vote mess.” That the PM’s communications director
would take the pains to tweet
Soudas’s arrival (the same comms guy made no such announcement about,
say, the arrival of Joe Oliver as finance minister) is explained by the
fact that Soudas’s return was intended to mark a return to skill and
competence in the Conservatives’ management of their internal affairs,
after the unfortunate business of a personal cheque, a PMO chief of
staff, and a telegenic senator. There was, and still is, the small
matter of a federal election to plan for. Another signal Soudas was
meant to send was that it will be Harper’s election, not some successor
Conservative leader’s, to win.

But it's all part of a larger pattern:

Lately when the PM sticks in his thumb he has not managed to handpick many plums: Mike Duffy, Nigel Wright, Marc Nadon, Soudas.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Stephen Harper does not believe in creating a big tent. His political success has been based on wedges. He drives them between people and reassembles the pieces that fit his agenda. And so, Tasha Kheiriddin writes, he will use labour unions as a wedge in the next election:

Harper calculates that labour will swing behind the NDP and split the vote for the Liberals:

Riling the labour movement will help the Conservatives if unions step up
support for their natural political ally: the NDP. Stopping the bleed
of NDP votes to the Liberals would help deny the Liberals seats,
particularly in Quebec, where the NDP gained the bulk of its caucus, and
the 905, where vote splits helped several Conservative candidates sidle
up the middle to victory.

But, Kheiriddin warns, the plan could backfire

if unions, particularly those representing the public sector, decide to
help the Liberals on the assumption that they are more likely to be
their new bosses in Ottawa. That relationship would require an
expression interest on the part of the Liberal party, however, and
there’s no major indication of that — yet.

With this prime minister, it's all politics all the time. And it's always about gaining the upper hand. You may have noticed that -- lately -- that strategy has been failing.

Saturday, March 29, 2014

In normal times, under a normal government, the Fair Elections Act
would have been withdrawn by now, or at least be in serious trouble. The
past few weeks have seen the bill denounced as a threat to democracy by
the chief electoral officer, the former chief electoral officer,
several provincial elections officials, academic experts domestic and
foreign, and newspaper editorials across the country.

Thursday they were joined by Harry Neufeld, the former chief
electoral officer of British Columbia and the author of an inquiry into
irregularities in the 2011 election. Mr. Neufeld’s report has been much
quoted by the minister responsible, Pierre Poilievre, in particular to
support his contention that the bill’s ban on “vouching” — allowing one
voter to affirm another’s eligibility to vote in a riding, in cases
where the usual documentation is lacking — was needed to prevent voter
fraud.

When it comes to electoral reform, a government needs support from those who normally don't side with it. Instead, we are treated to Pierre Poilievre:

To the detailed objections of its critics, he offers nothing but the
same, and I mean exactly the same, talking points, recited without
evident effort to persuade but merely to impress upon his listeners how
genuinely uninterested in their opinion he is. To [Harry] Neufeld’s
complaints at having his report misrepresented, he responds that Mr.
Neufeld does not understand his own report. The inaccurate and
out-of-context passages he had cited from it were, he told Parliament,
quoted “accurately and in context.” If Mr. Neufeld did not wish to use
these words, he blithely told the CBC’s Evan Solomon, he should not have
written them.

And why have things comes to this? Coyne pulls no punches. The government will pass this bill,

not in spite of the opposition it has aroused, but because of it:
because it has convinced itself that all such opposition, from whatever
source, proceeds from the same implacably partisan motives as its own.

Friday, March 28, 2014

Mark Felt -- alias Deep Throat -- advised Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money. It was good advice forty years ago; and it's good advice now. Consider the following report from Althia Raj at the Huffington Post:

The Conservative government has spent $482 million on outside legal
fees since it came to power in 2006. And more than $447,045 to defend
the Prime Minister, his staff and ministers, according to documents
tabled in the House of Commons.

These fees were for lawyer's outside the house that Harper built:

As Liberal MP Sean Casey said, " “It’s just a shocking number. They closed Veterans [Affairs]’ district offices and saved $5 million
bucks, [but] over the past eight years, they’ve spent half a billion on
outside lawyers. It’s pretty stark.”

It's not that the government doesn't have its own stable of lawyers:

Although the Department of Justice employs approximately 2,500 lawyers
who defend the government on all types of matters, it also relies on
private-sector law practitioners to carry out its mandate, spokeswoman
Carole Saindon said Wednesday.

The outside lawyers were used largely to defend various Conservatives who found themselves the subjects of ethics investigations. Charlie Angus discovered that

the vast majority of outside legal services used by Tory cabinet
ministers and those under their employ were used to defend against
probes by Commons’ Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson or investigations by
Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault, who looks into abuses of the
Access to Information regimen.

At Public Works and Government Services Canada, for example, $194,988
was paid between 2011 and 2013 to Paul K. Lepsoe, the Conservative Party
of Canada’s former lawyer. Lepsoe’s work was related to an ethics probe
involving former minister Christian Paradis as well as an investigation
into whether his political staff improperly interfered in the handling
of Access to Information requests.

The Harperites came to power promising sound economic management and righteous government.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Andrew Nikiforuk writes that petropolitics are behind what is going on in Ukraine:

Russia, a true petro state, sits on one-fifth of the world's natural gas
supply. About one-third of the natural gas burnt in Europe comes from
Russia via Ukraine, which once housed the Russian capital centuries ago.
In addition, Russia almost exports as much oil as Saudi Arabia.

Not surprisingly, Putin gets his political mojo from oil and gas
revenues just as Margaret Thatcher once secured her power base on
proceeds from the North Sea. Nearly 50 per cent of Russia's total budget
depends on the sale of hydrocarbons.

It's a familiar story these days:

The story should be familiar to most North Americans. In U.S. political
lingo, Ukraine is a blue state dependent on energy imports from Russia,
the powerful red state next door. They share a tense master-slave
relationship.

And, of course, our prime minister plays the same game, although he lectures Putin on his wrong headed approach to international relations. Those relations these days have become toxic -- because oil and gas corrupt petro states.

It's time, Nikiforuk writes, to recognize a few petro truths:

As long as energy prices remain high and fill government coffers,
Putin will use energy to keep the former Soviet Union in his fold and to
strut his stuff.
• It is unlikely that Ukraine will break
free of its corrupt energy relationship with Russia anytime soon. Expect
more oligarchs and instability.
• The West ignores its greatest
vulnerability: unsustainable energy spending. Cheap energy created
energy-intensive, capitalist, growth-oriented and market-driven systems,
and expensive energy will unravel the miracle.
• Extreme and high-cost energy from
unconventional resources, such as deep ocean oil and bitumen, with lower
energy returns, has now constricted much of the industrial world and
locked it in stagnation.
• Industrial nations are cannibalizing their economies to run faster on an energy treadmill. Strangely, they think Putin is mad.
• In this brave new world, energy exporters
will behave like masters and energy importers will submit like slaves.
And there will be more and more Ukraines.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

It's beginning to look, Lawrence Martin writes, like the revolt has begun:

Last week, the Supreme Court offered a declaration of its independence,
reminding the Prime Minister that its power is constitutionally
entrenched, not subject to his whims or arrogance. In pushing a highly
controversial choice on the court, the PM tried to retroactively rewrite
the rules via one of his much-criticized omnibus bills. The court’s
stinging rebuke was applauded by pundits and editorialists across the
land.

Criticism of the Fair Elections Act has become international:

The so-called Fair Elections Act appears to be meeting a similar fate. Universal condemnation and ridicule has greeted it.
Even Canada’s academic community, usually silent in respect to abuse of
power in Ottawa, has gotten in on the act on this one. Last week,
democracy experts from around the world joined in, saying the bill would
cripple the autonomy of Elections Canada and send a bad example to
budding democracies.

And the RCMP -- which we assumed was under the Prime Minister's thumb -- keeps uncovering embarrassing revelations:

On the Senate expenses scandal, they were quick to come out with a
report that revealed how the Prime Minister’s Office tried to shield the
whole sordid affair. On this, there is still more fallout to come.

So to avoid the backlash, Mr. Harper has gone to the Ukraine to lecture Vladamir Putin on how his invasion of a foreign country generates international condemnation. This from the man who loudly supported George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.

He didn’t read the tea leaves on Senator Mike Duffy; stripping Duffy
of his senatorship might have been the right thing to do, but wouldn’t
it leave Duffy with a desperate need to defend his reputation? Harper
didn’t realize that the approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline might hinge
on Canada’s environmental reputation; bashing the treehuggers might
please the base at home, but why would President Barack Obama risk his
green legacy on an environmental laggard? And Harper didn’t get that the
Fair Elections Act would be perceived as unfair; Elections
Canada’s get-out-the-vote campaigns are of limited effect, so why would
people care if it could no longer run them?

It's remarkable that a man with so little understanding of people could succeed as a politician -- because, in the end, he screws up. His failure to appoint Marc Nadon to the Supreme Court is his latest debacle:

Harper assumed the law is the law, and there was no way the SCC could
get around it. When the appointment was challenged, the prime minister
decided to safeguard it by changing the rules and amended the Supreme
Court Act in the House of Commons.

But judges are not robots on a bench. They are human beings, with
egos and feelings. They are also members of a community that takes
itself very, very seriously. They apply the law that governs all
Canadians; they act as guardians of rights and freedoms; they keep
overreaching governments in check. And above all, they are independent — and they must maintain that quality to preserve their reputation, and that of the legal system itself.

Which raises the question, how can such a man be elected in a democracy? The answer is hiding in plain sight: by subverting that democracy.

Monday, March 24, 2014

Murray Dobbin writes that our political system is ill equipped to deal with crises:

Our political system's greatest flaw is not the first-past-the-post
voting system. It is the fact that it is gravely ill-equipped to deal
with crises with which it has no experience. We have muddled through for
decades tinkering with the perversity of capitalism. But capitalism has
long since entered the cancer stage, as Canadian philosopher John
McMurtry so prophetically described in his 1999 book (now updated), The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. It is no longer capable of recognizing the crisis it faces and like a cancer attacks its own body.

Crises must be met with big ideas. None of our political parties are generating them. The NDP used to do just that -- until it came close to power and dreamed of winning a majority:

The dramatic shift in strategy -- seriously going for a majority --
has been disastrous for the NDP. It led them to opportunistically defeat
the Liberal government and give power to Stephen Harper. Inexorably,
the NDP is becoming another liberal party in order to be competitive.
Federally, they're badly trailing a Liberal Party with a pretty face and
no policies. The tragic irony in this is, of course, that even if the
NDP did win, it would have a mandate limited to liberal policies.

Social democracy in the developed world has
already suffered the same fate -- as it has provincially in Canada. In
Europe, New Zealand and Australia, it is virtually indistinguishable
from neoliberal parties and is in decline. In Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia
and B.C., NDP caution has been rewarded by voter rejection.

Dobbin believes the NDP was a better -- and more effective party -- when it rejected the swan song of power. One wonders how many other Dippers agree with him.

Sunday, March 23, 2014

The Canadian Press reports that pollster Nick Nanos and former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page are working on a project to increase youth turnout in the next election. Nanos has gone back and looked at the data he gathered during the last election. He's reached some startling conclusions:

Just over 60 per cent of eligible voters actually cast ballots in
2011. Among those under 30, fewer than 40 per cent bothered to vote.

Working
with Kevin Page, the former parliamentary budget officer, on a project
aimed at engaging youth in the political process, Nanos has mined data
from his daily polling during the 2011 campaign as well as research done
for the Institute for Research on Public Policy to answer the question:
What if 60 per cent of young people had voted?

His answer: Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives likely wouldn't have won a majority.

But, besides affecting the outcome, Nanos believes that young voters would have influenced the debate:

More importantly, he says the political debate would have been more
hopeful and would have revolved around a broader range of issues if
young people had been more engaged in the process.

"What we find
is that their concerns are much more diverse than older Canadians who
are fixated on jobs and health care," Nanos said in an interview. "So if
you're a younger Canadian, you're twice as likely to say that the
environment is a top national issue of concern. You're twice as likely
to say that education is a top national issue of concern."

His
analysis also suggests older Canadians "are very cynical, they have less
confidence in finding solutions" whereas younger people "are actually
much more hopeful, have a higher level of confidence in finding
solutions."

The Harperites must be looking at the same data. That's why they want to shut down Elections Canada's efforts to encourage voting.

The kids scare the Conservatives -- because they know they could be game changers.

Saturday, March 22, 2014

The Harper government figured it would teach the Supreme Court
justices a lesson by appointing Marc Nadon to their midst. Instead, the
justices taught the Harper government a bunch of lessons.

Among
the lessons: Don’t play politics with the judiciary. Don’t play fast and
loose with the law. Pick the best-qualified, not the average.
Understand the Constitution.

The Harperites came to Ottawa with one purpose -- to rig the system in their favour. The Court has sent a clear message. You can't rig the court -- although the government almost did just that:

They almost succeeded, which ought to produce a lot of soul-searching
among those who care about the integrity of the courts. The country’s
legal profession remained abjectly silent in the face of a
less-than-satisfactory process that produced an obviously ideological
appointment. The parliamentary committee barely studied the candidate,
in fairness perhaps because MPs were given so little time to investigate
a nominee about whom so little was known. Law professors, with a few
exceptions, clammed up despite their beloved tenure. It took the Supreme
Court, by a resounding 6-1 majority, to say “No.”

It was Toronto lawyer Rocco Galati who got the legal community to take notice.

The elites -- who the Harperites used rail against -- are on the government's side. It will take a revolt from ordinary Canadians to send them packing.

Friday, March 21, 2014

With the departure of Alison Redford, Andrew Nikiforuk writes, the honeypot has claimed another victim. Nikiforuk believes that petro states eventually become honeypots:

American political scientist Terry Lynn Karl, an expert on the
politics of oil, once noted that "petroleum dependence turns oil states
into 'honey pots' -- ones to be raided by all actors, foreign and
domestic, regardless of the long-term consequences produced by this
collective rent seeking."

People come to Alberta to make a killing in the oil fields, not a living. And that sense of entitlement pervades the province.

Redford's downfall was, in part, related to
this entitlement. She regularly dipped into the honeypot to court rich
pipeline supporters in the U.S., and then mourned the death of Nelson
Mandela with an extravagant $45,000 public bill. Albertans were
offended.

In the end, oil is a curse. It encourages bad behaviour and causes dysfunction:

Petro states, whether small or big, right or left, democratic or
authoritarian, all behave badly to different degrees. And Alberta, just
like Texas or Saudi Arabia, has often proven a self-serving plantation
for the extraction of fossil fuels with temporary foreign workers for
the benefit of a few.

Thanks to the curse of oil, they can't
diversify their economies or balance their budgets. They rack up poor
social welfare scores and widen inequality. They appear large and
powerful, but as Redford's departure illustrates, are truly hollowed out
shells. Last but not least, they cultivate devastating environmental
damage.

In the end, the leaders of petro states do their societies and themselves in. Stephen Harper has told us that his mission is to transform Canada into an energy superpower. Eventually, like Redford, his ambition will do him in.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Commentators are lining up to praise Jim Flaherty. Andrew Coyne is not among them. Under Flaherty, he writes, budgets ceased to have much meaning. They became masterpieces of obfuscation:

Under Flaherty, not only did budgets cease to be budgets — now they
are Economic Action Plans — but they ceased to mean much of anything.

The budget and the estimates are not only expressed on different
accounting systems, but parliamentarians are provided with no means of
reconciling the two. Actual departmental spending, as recorded in the
public accounts, routinely bears no resemblance to either.

More and more spending is now disguised as tax credits, materially
understating both expenditures and revenues. Even the official spending
figures have proved harder and harder to trust. Requests for details on
spending cuts from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, which departments
are statutorily obliged to provide, have been rebuffed. Sometimes, as in
the case of the F-35 program, they’ve simply been false.

And, instead of budgets, we got omnibus bills -- all supposedly in support of the economy. Those bills hid a mountain of contradictions:

Should we remember the Flaherty who, against every axiom of
economics, cut the GST rather than cutting income taxes, then larded up
the tax code with all manner of special tax breaks for favoured
political interests? Or should we remember him as the tax cutter who
made deep reductions in corporate tax rates, the policy innovator who
brought in the Tax-Free Savings Account and the Working Income Tax
Benefit, the free trader who eliminated all tariffs on intermediate
goods?

Of course he was both, but the confusion underscores how far afield
the Tories have wandered in the last eight years. Even after the recent
cuts, Flaherty leaves with spending higher than it was at the start of
his tenure — after inflation, after population growth. It wasn’t the GST
cuts that drove us into deficit: had Flaherty only left spending where
he found it, revenues would have exceeded spending in every year but
2009-10, when with the help of the recession it might have hit
$10-billion — versus the $56-billion actual figure.

Of course, the real finance minister has always been Stephen Harper. Those contradictions are his contradictions. They are what the prime minister wants to hide. That is why Joe Oliver's swearing in yesterday was done in secret. Harper's paranoia is now full blown.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Jim Flaherty jumped ship yesterday. It came as no surprise. When he questioned the wisdom of income splitting, he signalled that he was heading for dry land. He had the temerity to question the central tenet of Harperism. The surplus could not be used to pay down the national debt. And, more unacceptable still, it could not be invested in national priorities. It had to be used for tax cuts.

Tax cuts don't serve the nation. They serve one purpose -- and one purpose only. They buy votes. And, therefore, they keep Stephen Harper in power. It was the equivalent of questioning the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation. Flaherty had to be ex-communicated. For his part, he was quite willing to leave.

While he issued a statement touting what he feels are his accomplishments as finance minister, it would appear that Mr. Flaherty is content to live in his apostasy. Like Milton's Lucifer, he prefers to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Politics has always been a nasty profession. But Stephen Harper has brought a new viciousness to the way it is practiced in Canada. That viciousness, Michael Harris writes, has been orchestrated by a merchant of venom -- Arthur Finkelstein:

Three U.S. Republican presidents, countless senators and other
right-wing world leaders like Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu
owe their success to Arthur J. Finkelstein’s brilliance as a
communications mastermind.

Finkelstein bases his approach to politics on three axioms:

“Finkel-think” is an approach to new-age techno-politics based on three
principles: 60 per cent of people don’t care about the news; perception,
not content, is what matters in our dumbed-down age; and the right
15-second attack ad can separate a rival’s head from his shoulders in a
heartbeat.

And he has left his mark:

Before Finkelstein, the word “liberal” was a descriptor with many
positive connotations, including tolerance and even enlightenment. After
him, “liberal” became the ultimate political pejorative. It was used to
brand and dismiss progressives as left-wing loons with dubious values
and a bad habit of raising taxes and spending the numbers off the credit
card. Never mind that the truth was the exact opposite —
Clinton/Bush-wise, that is. But perception, not reality, is what
matters.

The key to success in political marketing, according to Finkelstein, is
to find the magic switch that moves people from rational to emotional
mode. No one understands the politics of personal destruction better
than Stephen Harper. The wimpy-looking Stephane Dion was “Not a Leader”;
the cosmopolitan Michael Ignatieff was “Just Visiting”; and now Justin
Trudeau is “In Over his Head”. Not exactly deep stuff — but again, content doesn’t matter.

And that explains the political success of a hollow man like Stephen Harper. But that success has come at a price for the country and for Harper. The prime minister made a Faustian bargain when he hired his Mephistopheles.

Monday, March 17, 2014

Last week the parliamentary press gallery passed the following motion:

"We as the Parliamentary Press Gallery reserve the right to ask questions
in all photo-ops and availabilities with the prime minister, cabinet
ministers, and all parliamentarians, to fulfill our function as
journalists in a democratic society.”

The motion was passed in the face of the government's policy of not taking questions from reporters. James Baxter, the editor of ipolitics, writes:

The Parliamentary Press Gallery has rarely shown the guts and gumption
of its Washington counterparts, but we lately have allowed ourselves to
be cowed and co-opted by political parties — first the Martin Liberals
and then the Harper Conservatives — and the bureaucracy to the point
where we are guilty of too often just accepting what they feed us and
pretending we’re grateful for the news McNuggets.

The Harper government came to power promising accountability. But, Baxter writes,

Accountability is in short supply within the 20 blocks that make up
the Parliamentary precinct. It was bad enough when public servants began
demanding they be referred to in media reports only as “officials” or
“informed sources.” Now, at a recent budget lockup, journalists were
told they couldn’t even say the background information given had come
from government officials at all.

We joke about the situation being borderline Soviet, but usually with
a nervous laugh. Are we on a slippery slope to a place where everyone
in the Parliamentary Press Gallery is working for some Canadian form of
Pravda?

Stephen Harper will go to the Ukraine, preaching the glory of democracy and railing against Soviet style repression. But he obviously works from the Soviet playbook. The truth about democracy is that:

The people have to consent to be governed. That only works if they have —
whether directly or through a proxy — a thorough understanding of what
is being done in their names and by whom. It is unreasonable to expect
any government — of the left or right — to give an honest accounting of
its activities. This is the basic role of any political journalist in a
Western democracy.

Everything the Harperites do is directed towards one objective -- making sure that the people don't understand what is going on. A supine press enables them to achieve that objective.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Minister of the Environment Leona Aglukkaq recently released a report setting forth her ministry's priorities. They are: "conservation and restoration of landscapes, water and wildlife;
information on changing weather patterns and minimizing threats from
pollution." These priorities are supposedly part of an overall plan to provide "a clean, safe and sustainable environment while supporting economic prosperity."

But, Andrew Nikiforuk writes, funding for the ministry is being slashed. As usual, the Harper government's rhetoric doesn't match its deeds:

For priority one, Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq promises in the
report's introduction "to protect and conserve wildlife and habitat" by
unveiling "a new National Conservation Plan to further increase
protected areas, focusing on stronger marine and coastal conservation."

Yet the department will cut funds for
wildlife and water programs by 19.2 per cent between now and 2016/17,
including a 35 per cent reduction to biodiversity programs, and nearly
10 per cent reductions for water programs, ecosystem sustainability and
enforcement.

The ministry's second priority is to improve information on changing weather patterns:

Yet Environment Canada's weather services will be cut by 17.6 per cent
between now and 2016/17. Funding for timely weather forecasts and
warnings, for example, will drop to $143 million from $166 million by
2017.

And, most laughable of all, the ministry promises to mitigate the effects of climate change. However:

Funding for climate change and clean air programs will fall to $55
million from $118 million, while the enforcement budget drops to $29
million from $41 million by 2017.

As a native Canadian, the minister should know that this government is full of empty rhetoric. That rhetoric masks its real objective, which is to destroy government institutions. She has been tasked with the job of sabotaging Environment Canada.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

In this morning's Globe and Mail, Bob Rae writes that -- as a general rule -- good businessmen don't make good politicians:

With the notable exception of Silvio Berlusconi, corporate divas don’t
do well in politics. There is a reason for this. To be an effective
politician is not as easy as it seems. It requires a sense of humour, a
thick skin, patience and more than a touch of guile. To do it well – and
democratically – needs great discipline, an ability to listen, and a
willingness to accept a harness of public scrutiny and irreverence that
is all-encompassing.

Whatever one thinks of Rae, his observation that being a good politician is harder than it looks is most certainly based on experience. And, therefore, his opinion of Pierre Karl Péladeau merits careful consideration:

He is decidedly on the right wing of the political spectrum, and his
management of the Quebecor empire has been controversial. For a Quebec
public servant or trade unionist to vote for Mr. Péladeau is like a
chicken voting for Colonel Sanders. He will brook neither criticism nor
opposition to whatever direction he decides, on his own counsel, needs
to be taken. He says he wants a country, presumably so he can run it.
The people who are going to be run should take heed.

Peladeau sounds a lot like a man named Harper. Given the fact that Peladeau is the father of Sun News, that should come as no surprise. The fact that he says he is a committed separatist should. A vote for Marois will mean a vote for Péladeau.

Friday, March 14, 2014

When historians eventually get around to rendering judgement on the Harper Government, they will point to many things. They will certainly cite the gutting of Statistics Canada. Jeffrey Simpson writes:

In the summer of 2010, more than 200 institutions and individuals
asked Stephen Harper’s government not to eliminate the long-form census.

They
represented a Who’s Who of experts in statistics. All sorts of groups,
from B’nai Brith to business associations and trade unions, argued that
the long-form census, which required some, but only some, citizens by
law to answer questions for Statistics Canada, was essential for
presenting the most accurate statistical profile of Canadians.

To no avail. The Prime Minister had made up his mind. His hapless
minister, Tony Clement, had to toe the line. He did so in such a way as
to misstate the true views of the head of Statistics Canada, who
resigned in protest.

But perhaps, more than anything else, the judgement of history will hinge on the Fair Elections Act and how -- once again -- the government paid no heed to its critics:

As Prof. Paul Thomas of the University of Manitoba (and a member of the
Elections Canada advisory board) pointed out in a paper he wrote about
the proposed changes, Britain’s electoral commission was extensively
consulted before changes to the law. Here, Mr. Poilievre said he spent
an hour with Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand before drafting the
bill. Obviously, he did not highly value Mr. Mayrand’s analysis during
their brief meeting, since the Chief Electoral Officer just dumped all
over important parts of the bill before the parliamentary committee.

Up to this point, there is no one piece of legislation which better defines the Harperites. And there is no better spokesman for them than Pierre Poilievre:

This is how the government is proceeding, led by Minister for Democratic
Reform Pierre Poilievre, a young man who leaped into the cabinet
principally for his leather-lunged abilities at partisan verbal
jousting. Anyone who believes Mr. Poilievre can act on just about
anything without the interests of the Conservative Party at heart has
not been observing his career thus far. Unbridled partisanship has its
place in politics, one supposes, but not for updating elections law.

The Harperites have never been concerned with governing. Their objective has always been to rig the system in their favour. And, when historians eventually take their measure, my bet is that the present government will be in the running for the worst government in Canadian history.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

When Stephen Harper was the Leader of the Opposition, Andrew Mitrovica writes, he sought out journalists:

He courted press coverage enthusiastically. (There’s a word commonly
used in Ottawa to describe politicians who hunger for media attention as
shamelessly as Harper once did; I’m guessing I can’t get away with
using it here.) In any event, Harper’s political career was aided and
abetted in some measure by his routine appearances on political chat
shows that featured him as a sound-bite-happy right-wing pundit.

But after he became prime minister -- his objective achieved -- he neurotically avoided journalists:

This neurosis manifests itself in several familiar ways. This is a prime
minister fond of playing hide-and-seek with reporters. He scurries
furtively to his Centre Block office after question period like a truant
schoolboy on his way to detention. He prefers to remain holed up in his
private quarters in Canada’s modest version of Air Force One, rarely
venturing out to be scrummed by the rabble occupying the
less-comfortable seats in the plane’s rear. He has even largely
abandoned those sonorous year-end interviews with network news anchors
and bureau chiefs.

Now he simply refuses to answer questions.

Harper's relationship with the press fits a pattern. He uses people then disposes of them. From Jim Hawkes, who he worked for, then ran against, to Preston Manning, to Tom Flanagan to Nigel Wright -- Harper's relationships are transactional.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Yesterday, with great fanfare, Stephen Harper signed a free trade deal with South Korea. He claims that the deal signals prosperity for Canada. There will be winners. But, Tom Walkom writes, they won't include the auto industry:

Some Canadian
high-tech firms, including those making aerospace equipment, hope to
profit from the deal announced Monday in Seoul. And perhaps some will.

So our environmental reputation will be reinforced by this deal. And one area of the country will benefit. According to The Canadian Press,

When it comes to job creation in Canada, there's Alberta and then there's everybody else.

The latest employment data for February showed the oil-rich western
province created an impressive 18,800 jobs, largely in construction,
mining and oil and gas, while in the rest of the country overall
employment fell.

As the Statistics Canada report issued Friday showed, Alberta is
responsible for almost all the new net jobs generated in the past year
— 82,300 of the 94,700 countrywide, or 87 per cent — as the province saw
employment rise an impressive 3.8 per cent.

By comparison, provinces not called Alberta only gained about 12,000
which, for the purposes of the agency's survey, constitutes a rounding
error.

You can bet that data will find its way into the Quebec election. We are sleepwalking into a constitutional crisis -- brought to you by a man who claims to be an economist.

The problem is that Harper's economics is straight out of the 19th century. Walkom writes:

Ottawa is retreating to the economy of a much earlier time, when Canada
concentrated on selling raw materials abroad and then imported whatever
manufactured goods were needed.

The prime minister enjoys living in the 19th century. His goal is to make the rest of us share his enjoyment.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Listening to Pierre Poilievre defend the "Fair" Elections Act, you really have to ask yourself: Just who is this guy? He insists that voter fraud is a major problem. But Michael Harris writes that a report by Harry Neufeld concluded that voter fraud was virtually non existent in Canada. However,

in what will surely go down as one of the funniest spectacles in
Canadian political history, Poilievre has been quoting from a report to
defend Bill C-23 even after the author of the report said he has misread it. That said, Poilievre manfully insists that his
interpretation of Neufeld’s report is correct; it’s the author who is
wrong. Which leads to this fully-frontal absurdity: Pierre Poilievre,
His Master’s Voice in this government, says that if Neufeld comes before
the parliamentary committee studying Bill C-23, the minister will not
be swayed by his testimony. But he will continue to cite the deluded
man’s report to justify the government’s crackdown on non-existent voter
fraud.

His position seems pretty clear. The truth is what I say it is. You cannot trust what other people say. You must trust me.

It's all of a piece for the man who Harris calls His Master's Voice. And it's all of a piece with the Orwellian title of the bill. Poilevre is a flim-flam man. The Harperites believe they make their own truth as they make their own reality.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Robert Reich writes that, in the three decades after World War II, the United States created the largest middle class the world has ever seen:

During those years the earnings of the typical American worker
doubled, just as the size of the American economy doubled. (Over the
last thirty years, by contrast, the size of the economy doubled again
but the earnings of the typical American went nowhere.)

In that earlier period, more than a third of all workers belonged to a
trade union — giving average workers the bargaining power necessary to
get a large and growing share of the large and growing economic pie.
(Now, fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are unionized.)

Then, CEO pay then averaged about 20 times the pay of their typical worker (now it’s over 200 times).

In those years, the richest 1 percent took home 9 to 10 percent of total income (today the top 1 percent gets more than 20 percent).

During that period, the national tax structure was radically different than the one Americans now live under:

Then, the tax rate on highest-income Americans never fell below 70 percent; under Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, it was 91 percent. (Today the top tax rate is 39.6 percent.)

Consider what those taxes bought:

In those decades, tax revenues from the wealthy and the growing middle
class were used to build the largest infrastructure project in our
history, the Interstate Highway system. And to build the world’s largest
and best system of free public education, and dramatically expand
public higher education.

Then came the Thatcher-Reagan Revolution and the Great U Turn. And now, citizens have forgotten their former prosperity. Reich pulls no punches:

The collective erasure of the memory of that prior system of broad-based
prosperity is due partly to the failure of my generation to retain and
pass on the values on which that system was based. It can also be
understood as the greatest propaganda victory radical conservatism ever
won.

Conservatism has triumphed. But the United States has paid a terrible price.

Sunday, March 09, 2014

The British economic historian Avner Offer believes that the gap between our economic model and our economic reality is now similar to the gap between Karl Marx's Communism and Leonid Breshnev's Communism. Chris Hedges reports:

Our current economic model, he said, will be of little use to us in an
age of ecological deterioration and growing scarcities. Energy
shortages, global warming, population increases and increasing scarcity
of water and food create an urgent need for new models of distribution.

“The state of current political economy in the West is similar to the
state of communism in the Soviet Union around 1970,” he went on. “It is
studied widely in the university. Everyone knows the formula. Everyone
mouths it in discourse. But no one believes it.” The gap between the
model and reality is now vast. Those in power seek “to bring reality
into alignment with the model, and that usually involves coercion.”

“The amount of violence that is inflicted is an indicator of how well the model is aligned with reality,” he said.

Offer points to the United States, the beacon of free market economics:

It is perhaps symptomatic that the USA, a society that elevates freedom
to the highest position among its values, is also the one that has one
of the very largest penal systems in the world relative to its
population. It also inflicts violence all over the world. It tolerates a
great deal of gun violence, and a health service that excludes large
numbers of people.”

That model -- all of it -- has been imported into Canada by the Harper government. We should not be surprised that voting is suppressed, that our scientists are muzzled, and that criminals are punished rather than rehabilitated.

Saturday, March 08, 2014

The Harperites didn't consult Marc Mayrand when they drew up their election "reforms." And there was a reason they did everything they could to prevent him from testifying before the parliamentary committee looking into those reforms.

The chief electoral officer, in his quiet, workmanlike way, simply
shredded it, almost line for line, proposing more than two dozen
amendments that would effectively rewrite the bill.

The provision banning “vouching” came in for particularly heavy fire:
while the government insists the practice, by which voters who lack
proper identification can have another voter vouch for them, has given
rise to widespread voter fraud, Mr. Mayrand observed there was no
evidence for this. It did not help the government’s position that the
authority it cited in response, Harry Neufeld, author of a report on
electoral irregularities in the 2011 election, later backed up Mr.
Mayrand’s stance. (“I never said there was voter fraud,” he told
Canadian Press.)

As is the case with almost all Tory legislation, there is no evidence to support the changes they advocate. But putting Pierre Polievre in charge of the bill's passage is a clear signal:

Entrusting the matter to Pierre Poilievre, among the most ruthlessly
partisan ministers in a government filled with ruthless partisans, was
an early warning sign. Sure enough, not content with blindsiding the
chief electoral officer, the minister — for Democratic Reform! — gave
media and opposition members the merest sniff of the mammoth bill before
thrusting it upon Parliament, where, after the usual curtailing of
debate, it was packed off to committee, whose hearings will be likewise
restricted (hence Mr. Christopherson’s filibuster). This is not how a
government interested in fairness conducts itself.

And the changes to campaign contributions sends another clear signal:

The bill would raise the limits on both contributions and spending. All
parties would benefit from this — needlessly: there’s never been so much
money in our politics — but the Conservatives, as the most successful
fundraisers, would plainly benefit most.

Coyne is right:

Perhaps each measure would not seem so troubling on its own; nor even
would the whole if the government did not seem so intent on smuggling it
into law. But as it is I think some alarm bells should really be going
off.

Friday, March 07, 2014

Earlier this week, Angela Merkel worried that Vladimir Putin was living "in another world." Leonoid Bershidsky writes that Putin does indeed inhabit another world -- not because he's crazy, but because he has read different books than those we have read:

Maria Snegovaya, a graduate student at Columbia University, provides a useful analysis of
the sources of Putin’s ideology, rooted in the writings of early 20th
century messianic, nationalist philosophers Nikolai Berdyayev, Vladimir
Solovyov and Ivan Ilyin. To them, Russia had a mission to spread and
maintain the Orthodox Christian faith on territories it controlled, and
the West was the eternal enemy of that mission, perpetually trying to
break up the Russian world. Snegovaya also recalls the 2006 book Third Empire: The Russia That Should Be,
by Mikhail Yuriev, an entrepreneur and ideologue popular with Kremlin
bureaucrats. In Yuryev’s utopia, Russia gathers up the lands of the old
Russian empire, grabbing, among other areas, eastern Ukraine after a
standoff with NATO. Two years before Russia’s small victorious war
against Georgia, Third Empire described a Russian conquest of the disputed Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

His education has given him a world view which has little in common with our Western -- Renaissance inspired -- world view:

Putin’s world view is so different from that of Western politicians
seeking to prevent a war that they are speaking different languages —
not just in the linguistic sense. The only language they have in common
is that of money, but it has little effect on Putin now.

In Putin’s world, the Russian civilization is clashing with the Western
one. Money and the formalities of international law mean little in this
existential struggle. Paradoxically, if the West is not willing to live
by the harsh rules of this imagined world, it is going to watch Putin
settle for less after threatening to take more. Specifically, Russia
will keep formal or informal control of the Crimea, while the rest of
Ukraine limps ahead on its nation-building path.

The disconnect with Russia mirrors our disconnect with the Islamic world. And -- for Canadians -- it raises the question, "What does Stephen Harper read?"

Thursday, March 06, 2014

Yesterday, Pauline Marois announced that Quebecers will be going to the polls on April 7th. She is prepared to defend her Charter of Values. But she has said nothing about holding a third referendum.

In 1980, my wife and I voted in the first referendum. But by 1995, like many of our generation, we had left Quebec -- not so much by choice but from necessity. I began my teaching career at a new high school in the Eastern Townships. The school's population was 1,100 students. By the time we left twelve years later -- because of Quebec's language law and a weak economy -- the school's enrolment was 300. We thought we better leave before they turned out the lights.

There are some who say that separatism is no longer an issue in Quebec. But, in the Toronto Star, Tom Walkom refers to Fredrick Nietzsche's definition of history. It was, said Nietzsche, “the unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things.”

Walkom then turns his attention to the subject of separation:

Certainly, separatism
has been dismissed before. The PQ’s failure to win a referendum on
sovereignty in 1980 was thought then to have put paid to the issue.

In 1989, with support
for separatism hovering near 40 per cent, sovereignty was said to be
dead and buried, The PQ’s then leader, Jacques Parizeau, was routinely
dismissed as a fossil from another time.

Young people, we were told then, had abandoned sovereignty and become internationally minded.

But anyone who dismisses Quebec nationalism as a spent force doesn't understand Quebec. Certainly, Stephen Harper doesn't understand Quebec. In fact, his contempt for all the provinces gives sovereignists the best argument they have ever had for separation.

I make no predictions this morning about this election. But I do feel uncomfortable -- because we are again going to experience the circular course of things.

Wednesday, March 05, 2014

The report from Elections Canada on irregularities in the 2011 election is due at the end of the month. Lawrence Martin foresees three possible scenarios unfolding:

One is that Elections Canada finds that the dirty work was limited to
just the riding of Guelph. In that case, no worries for Mr. Harper. We
move on.

A second is that Elections Canada finds evidence of
robocalls and other acts of subterfuge in many ridings, but leaves
hanging the question of whether the Conservatives were the perpetrators.
In this case, the party would likely assail Elections Canada as biased
(“team jersey” wearers, as Mr. Poilievre recently hinted) and try to ride out the storm.

A
third possibility is that Elections Canada comes forward with strong
evidence that the party hierarchy was behind a concerted and widespread
effort to subvert the voting system. This would be far bigger than the
Senate expenses scandal – all hell would break loose. The Harper team’s
fate would be sealed. Big-time Conservatives who spoke at the Manning
conference could start revving up their leadership campaigns.

It's the third scenario that is causing the Harper Party to lose sleep. And that is the reason behind their insistence that the bill be passed quickly. Martin writes:

Some see the bill, with its downgrading of powers and many rule changes,
as a bid to give the Conservatives an escape hatch from any culpatory
findings by the agency’s investigation. James Sprague, a former
Elections Canada lawyer, says the new act can be interpreted as
forbidding the Elections Canada commissioner from disclosing any
information that comes to the agency’s knowledge as a result of an
investigation. Instead, it would be up to the director of public
prosecutions to include the information in an annual report to the
justice minister.

When Preston Manning suggested over the weekend that the bill was a barrier to democracy, he was not speaking theoretically. He knows his man.

Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Michael Harris writes that the Harper Party keeps moving closer to its own self destruction. Last weekend, the Manning Conference stripped Mr. Harper naked. He is no longer the leader of Canadian conservatives. Preston Manning himself -- in polite language -- called Harper a dictator:

The man who laid the foundations for Stephen Harper’s political career
in 1987 has urged the prime minister to restore democracy. Yikes! The
only place you need to restore democracy is somewhere that it doesn’t
exist. Was it possibly the gentlest way of telling someone they were a
dictator?

Harper's objective is not to establish a conservative hegemony. It's power -- pure and simple. And the so called "Fair Elections Act" is a plan to retain power. Manning saw through the facade:

The elder statesman of Reform/Conservative politics in Canada said
out loud what a lot of Canadians have been thinking for some time: Time
to restore democracy, Mr. Prime Minister, not subvert it.

Give Elections Canada the power it asked for, rather than diminishing
the power the CPC wished EC didn’t have in the Robocalls investigation.
How do you improve elections by reducing the powers of EC? How does it
help an investigation to inform the target of the scrutiny — unless
you’re in favour of evidence disappearing?

Mr. Harper has no clothes. And he has nowhere to hide. And -- just as he failed to foresee the Great Recession -- he doesn't foresee the coming implosion.

Monday, March 03, 2014

Jeffrey Simpson writes that, in what used to be called "The White Commonwealth," Margaret Thatcher's children are in charge:

Mrs. Thatcher’s children, intellectually speaking, are prime ministers
in four countries: Tony Abbott in Australia, Stephen Harper in Canada,
David Cameron in Britain and John Key in New Zealand.

They are obviously not carbon copies of the Iron Lady, as their
respective countries’ different political and economic circumstances
require different approaches. But these conservative prime ministers are
Thatcherites at heart. They see the state more as an impediment to
growth and social progress than an asset, they think tax rates are too
high and they believe the private sector can run most things most
efficiently.

None of these leaders are what we used to call "moderate conservatives:"

In Australia, if one goes back a few conservative leaders, one recalls
Malcolm Fraser and Robert Menzies. Canada had Robert Stanfield, Joe
Clark and Brian Mulroney. In the United States, there were the
northeastern “Rockefeller” Republicans. And in Britain, there were Mrs.
Thatcher’s “wets,” who she replaced, banished or marginalized – men such
as Edward Heath, Michael Heseltine and Francis Pym.

Like the Iron Lady, they believe that "there is no such thing as society." And so, they don't look to government to solve problems; nor do they have the vision to solve them.

With the future of the planet in the balance -- as Britain floods and Australia burns -- they have no solutions.

Sunday, March 02, 2014

Andrew Coyne writes that there is a distinct difference between conservatives and Conservatives. That difference was on display at this weekend's Manning Conference:

The Conservative party is supposed to be conservative. If the Manning
conference has gotten more overtly partisan over the years, it may be
because the party has gotten less overtly anything, other than
unpleasant. Or rather, the leadership has. But looking at the contrast
between this ostensibly non-partisan convention and its partisan
predecessor, the thought occurs: this is the real Conservative
convention. It is a gathering, if you like, of the Conservative party in
exile.

The party that met in Calgary was not so much the Conservative party as
the Harper party. It was run by and for Harper loyalists — think Pierre
Poilievre — people who are happy to do whatever the leader wants done,
say whatever the leader wants said, even if that means abandoning every
core conviction the party has ever held. In its place is Harperism, less
an ideology than a set of behaviours: the nastiness, the ruthlessness,
the almost universal gracelessness, of which the decision to exclude the
opposition parties from the mission to Ukraine was only the latest
example.

The two types of conservatives -- small c and big C -- have decided to part company:

Nothing was said out loud, no knives were unsheathed, but this had the
feel of a group of people preparing for a post-Harper party. From the
title (“Next Steps”) to the speakers, a banquet of potential leadership
contenders, the tone is of serious people who want to talk about serious
ideas, stripped (mostly) of the hyper-partisan rhetoric and
name-calling: the grown-ups, the good faith Conservatives.

The Manning attendees were told that their numbers are headed south. And Manning himself criticized Harperian election reforms, saying that the challenge was to increase election turnout. On the environment, he said that the Harper Party was "exasperating."

All of that was as it should be. Harper threw Manning under the bus. Manning was simply returning the favour.

Saturday, March 01, 2014

This week, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation handed out its Golden Pig Awards for profligate public spending. And -- world of wonders -- Jason Kenney's ministry, Employment and Social Development Canada, copped a pig.

How was that possible? After all, Michael Harris writes, Stephen Harper has a long and distinguished record of railing against pigs at the public trough:

Don’t they know how much Steve hates pigs in public life? Back in
1997, when he was president of the National Citizen’s Coalition, Steve
outed lots of pigs during the election campaign of that year. In fact,
he actually put the heads of two Liberal MPs, Anne McLellan and Judy
Bethel, on the bodies of pigs for a newspaper ad campaign against
“pension porkers”. I ask you, would a man with swinish leanings do
something like that?

And let’s not forget how he outed his own leader in 1994. Steve
revealed that Preston Manning had a secret party slush fund of $31,000
that he used to enhance his appearance with a new hair-do and some
decent suits. Steve knew that was unacceptable extravagance. Not having a
bus in those days, he went public and threw his own leader to the media
wolves. Doesn’t that tell you what kind of man he is?

And, to make matters worse, we also discovered that the PMO -- which keeps Mr. Harper in the dark -- put $66,000 in staff breakfasts on the public tab. However, Tony Clement -- that ever watchful guardian of the public purse -- said that the breakfasts were within government guidelines:

The ever-reliable Tony Clement reminded everyone of the essential facts here: that there are
no facts. The president of Treasury Board stated plainly and simply
that the lunches fell within his department’s guidelines — end of story.
It was Tony’s riff on the Nixonian tradition: If your Treasury Board
president says it, it must be so, especially in the decree democracy of
Steve.

And that's the point, isn't it? They get to say what is wasteful spending and what is not. There is one rule for thee and another rule for me.

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.